Belinda Carlisle sings "Wouldn't It Be Nice" with the Beach Boys at Waikiki Beach in 1986 for their 25th anniversary concert. Back when male-female duets were way more common and more spirited than today. The Kelly green color of her dress is lively, neither dull nor raunchy. How hard was that to figure out and pull off? Everyone looks so unpretentious, like they just grabbed whatever struck their eye when it was time to get dressed, not being micro-sculpted and polished by a committee of stylists for some OCD audience that wouldn't be able to enjoy good music if the performers didn't look perfectly in-character. And before their brains became warped by 24-hour phone-staring, there are plenty of nice natural smiles on the girls in the audience.
October 15, 2013
October 11, 2013
Von Borskolitz among the Gefalkendorflers, or how Slavic is eastern Germany?
Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran asks about present-day populations that more or less replaced an earlier one genetically and linguistically, in contrast to those who adopted the language of the conquered or whose small gene pool melted into the surroundings. My comments are copy-and-pasted below, since they're part of my ongoing look at the split between German speakers in the hilly/mountain regions vs. those of the Great European Plain.
East Germany. Not too many Slavs left
in the former stomping grounds of the Wends. The (Ostro)Goths had
been in parts of eastern Europe before, but didn’t really hang
around long. Northeastern Europe was settled more by Balto-Slavic
peoples. Then a series of raids, crusades, and settlements
(Ostsiedlung) gradually stripped the land away in favor of Germanics.
There’s always been a minority of
Slavic folks and their language in eastern Germany, but the cultural
and AFAIK genetic Germanicization of that area is a fait accompli.
The Balts managed to get back their territory from what used to be
eastern Prussia, and the Slavs managed to take back Silesia in
central Europe, but that’s it. Berlin and Leipzig aren’t going
back any time soon.
Berlin — Slavic berl- (“swamp”) + -in
Leipzig — Slavic Lipsk (“linden
tree settlement”)
Dresden — Slavic Drežďany (“people
of the forest”)
Potsdam — Slavic Poztupimi (“beneath
the oaks”?)
Chemnitz — Slavic Kamjenica (“stony
brook”)
Lübeck — Slavic Liubice (“lovely”)
Rostock — Slavic Roztoc (“broadening
of the river”)
Cottbus — Slavic Chotebud (Sorbian
personal name)
Also, German surnames ending in “-itz”
bear the Slavic suffix seen in “-ic” / “-ich” / etc. — von
Clausewitz, Nimitz, and so on.
Although the eastern Germans don’t
seem to be very linguistically or genetically Slavic, they do have
that whole dark, brooding Sturm und Drang mindset that is more
(Balto-)Slavic than Germanic. Admittedly, Nords are somewhat that
way, but more in a resigned suicidal way — not in a resentful,
revenge fantasy way like the narrator of Notes from Underground.
Those East German place names sound
about as Germanic as Massachusetts and Minnesota sound English. Yet
unless we read into the history, we don’t stop and think, Gee,
those city names sure don’t sound like Krauttenhammer,
Neumannerfetting, Gedorfenbacher, Schlausbund, or whatever our naive
ears would have expected. Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s right
under our noses.
October 9, 2013
Gay Peter Pan-isms: Pointing
Lately I've noticed something uniquely juvenile about gay behavior from having to stand in line near them at fast food places. When they're discussing what they're going to order, they have a tendency to point at the menu. They do this also when telling the cashier what they want to order. And when they point, they hold their arm straight out, and for a lingering stretch of time.
Why is this faggot pointing at something not even 3 feet away? And that he's staring directly at? And commenting on with language? ("Seriously, is this like the hottest set of robot lips you've ever seen or what?") Notice how extended his arm is; he's employing it to direct attention.
Then I remembered Michael Tomasello's work on human vs. other primate communication, where he argues that our communication began with gesture, including pointing. Our close primate relatives point, but they don't have language. And more relevant here, children begin pointing earlier than they have a decent grasp of language, around 1 year old. It's their way of communicating to others what the object of their attention or focus is, before they can do so with symbolic words.
I didn't know what to make of this at first, only that it was something that normal men and women hardly ever do. And if normal people point, they usually keep their arm bent at the elbow and hold their arm closer to their body, while pointing for a split-second. It's kind of an after-thought gesture for normal people. With queers, it's like they're seriously trying to direct your attention to whatever they're pointing straight at, as though you couldn't already tell.
Even more strangely, they're pointing at something that is close by, where eye direction and verbal description should be sufficient to signal the other person what the queer is attending to. Pointing is redundant. Adolescents and adults typically point when the object is way off in the distance, when determining exactly what bearing and distance can be tricky by just looking at the person's eyes.
Why is this faggot pointing at something not even 3 feet away? And that he's staring directly at? And commenting on with language? ("Seriously, is this like the hottest set of robot lips you've ever seen or what?") Notice how extended his arm is; he's employing it to direct attention.
Then I remembered Michael Tomasello's work on human vs. other primate communication, where he argues that our communication began with gesture, including pointing. Our close primate relatives point, but they don't have language. And more relevant here, children begin pointing earlier than they have a decent grasp of language, around 1 year old. It's their way of communicating to others what the object of their attention or focus is, before they can do so with symbolic words.
Children use eye direction to signal what they're interested in as early as infancy, like this kid is. Pointing for children is not a substitute for eye direction but for linguistic commentary. Your partner won't or can't always look at your eyes to see what you're looking at, so you'll need some other way to point it out. Actual pointing gets the job done, but is pretty crude -- again, think of trying to direct your partner's attention to an object situated some ways away, from pointing alone. It's much easier when you can use words -- "See the elk on the very left side of the herd? It looks like it's limping, so we should attack that one first." Using your arm and finger to point just won't achieve the same precision and resolution from far away. It takes time to acquire language, though, so children make do with pointing in the meantime.
Pointing is considered rude in so many cultures for a variety of reasons, but a key factor is that it just looks so damn immature. Teaching your kids "good manners" is partly to get them to respect local norms, and partly to get them to act like a grown-up would in any culture. Even by adolescence, normal people don't generally go around pointing at things. "Don't point -- say it instead."
Male preferential homosexuality reflects an arresting or at least a severe slowing down of psychological development in childhood, most obviously shown by the fact that faggots find all pussy repulsive. When exactly it strikes is not clear, though, and by looking over as many examples of their stuntedness as possible, we can narrow it down.
Since pointing emerges around 1 year old, it must strike after that age. This is confirmed by the lack of a season-of-birth effect. I don't know when pointing rapidly leaves the kid's repertoire of everyday communication, but no later than puberty. Children still rely heavily on pointing even at age 3 or 4, when their linguistic skills are still pretty weak -- at least, they don't command large enough of a vocabulary that could "point" to objects with higher resolution than arm-and-finger pointing.
This example is also valuable because it allows a direct test of the other main framework for viewing gay behavior -- namely, that they are feminized. Yet grown-up women don't point very much, let alone with their arm fully extended, when it's already perfectly clear from eye direction and language what they're attending to. On the other hand, pre-pubescent girls are no different from pre-pubescent boys in relying on pointing, especially at earlier stages such as the toddler years. Gays resemble small children of either sex more than they do male or female adolescents or adults.
Women are more neotenous than men, so for most examples these two frameworks have the same prediction. The handful of cases where they make different predictions, though, it always goes in favor of the infantilization model. The other, most important, glaringly obvious, and highly politically relevant case is marriage and raising a family -- gays have no interest in those things, particularly not in "being a mommy" to little babies. There they are more like immature children rather than adolescent or adult women (or men, who have their own form of wanting to marry and raise children).
October 7, 2013
Harmonizing vocals and falling inequality
The main driver of social-cultural trends is the trend in the crime rate, which is closely related to how cocooning vs. socially connected people are. They get at what's going on at the grassroots, face-to-face level. Then there's a separate, political-economic cycle that applies to our relationships that are more aggregate and mediated by institutions.
Most people don't know what the political-economic cycle looks like, so here is a handy and informative article by Peter Turchin, who's doing the most to synthesize the dynamics of the phenomena in each of the different domains (such as inequality, over-production of elites, intra-elite competition, debt, and so on). Inequality is the easiest to understand of all the proxies, and it has much better data over time. It began growing around 1820 in America and only peaked around 1910-1920, after which it fell through a trough sometime in the '70s, and has been rising again ever since.
I haven't referred to it too much because my main focus is on social relations and culture, and those turning points don't appear to slice up social-cultural history into coherent periods. For example, the Roaring Twenties (and early '30s, the end of the Jazz Age) would go with the slow-paced, atomized '40s and '50s, as well as the more exciting '60s and '70s. And then the '80s would go with the '90s and 21st century, whereas the movies, popular music, design, etc., would split them off from the past 20 or so years.
But there are aspects of culture where it's easy to see competitiveness -- or a taboo against competitiveness. And sure enough, those seem to map onto the inequality cycle, with greater signs of competitiveness when inequality is widening. An earlier post looked at the rise of facial hair as a form of status jockeying among aspiring elite males, and its disappearance as a sign of the decline of such status contests, going back from the early 1800s to the present.
Here's another one -- close harmony in pop music vocals. This is where multiple voices harmonize (duh), but where the notes are closer together in pitch, rather than spread farther apart. Often in pop music there isn't any vocal harmony at all, just one voice singing. With close harmony, not only do you hear several voices working together, they're all fairly similar in pitch, so they don't sound too, too distinctive from one another.
What pop music groups exemplify this technique?
Most people don't know what the political-economic cycle looks like, so here is a handy and informative article by Peter Turchin, who's doing the most to synthesize the dynamics of the phenomena in each of the different domains (such as inequality, over-production of elites, intra-elite competition, debt, and so on). Inequality is the easiest to understand of all the proxies, and it has much better data over time. It began growing around 1820 in America and only peaked around 1910-1920, after which it fell through a trough sometime in the '70s, and has been rising again ever since.
I haven't referred to it too much because my main focus is on social relations and culture, and those turning points don't appear to slice up social-cultural history into coherent periods. For example, the Roaring Twenties (and early '30s, the end of the Jazz Age) would go with the slow-paced, atomized '40s and '50s, as well as the more exciting '60s and '70s. And then the '80s would go with the '90s and 21st century, whereas the movies, popular music, design, etc., would split them off from the past 20 or so years.
But there are aspects of culture where it's easy to see competitiveness -- or a taboo against competitiveness. And sure enough, those seem to map onto the inequality cycle, with greater signs of competitiveness when inequality is widening. An earlier post looked at the rise of facial hair as a form of status jockeying among aspiring elite males, and its disappearance as a sign of the decline of such status contests, going back from the early 1800s to the present.
Here's another one -- close harmony in pop music vocals. This is where multiple voices harmonize (duh), but where the notes are closer together in pitch, rather than spread farther apart. Often in pop music there isn't any vocal harmony at all, just one voice singing. With close harmony, not only do you hear several voices working together, they're all fairly similar in pitch, so they don't sound too, too distinctive from one another.
What pop music groups exemplify this technique?
[T]he Beach Boys, the Hollies, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Bee Gees, the Andrews Sisters, the Boswell Sisters, the Original Clark Sisters, the Louvin Brothers, the Revelers, the Lennon Sisters, the Comedian Harmonists, the Mills Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the Eagles, the Pied Pipers, the Three X Sisters, the Chordettes, the McGuire Sisters, the Lescano Trio, the Viennese Singing Sisters and modern groups such as The Puppini Sisters [who no one's ever heard of]. . . . Many gospel and soul groups in the 1950s and 60s also used this technique. . . . The folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel used close harmony, echoing their chosen role-models, the Everly Brothers. The Louvin Brothers were a duo that used close harmony in the genre of country music. . . . doo-wop can be seen as a commercialization of this genre.
So it got started during the 1920s or early '30s at the latest, reached a peak during the '50s and '60s, held on somewhat into the '70s, but has been heard increasingly less since then. Note how different all of those groups sound. Those bird's-eye differences are what track the crime rate. But throughout the whole period, there was a drive to use heavy vocal harmonies that weren't too far apart in pitch. Here's a quick overview of some hits with heavy harmonies, spanning all sorts of stylistic genres.
"Heebie Jeebies" by the Boswell Sisters (1932), Jazz Age jazz (harmonies begin at 1:00)
"Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" by the Andrews Sisters (1941), swing era
"Mr. Sandman" by the Chordettes (1954), pop
"Sugartime" by the McGuire Sisters (1958), pop
"Cathy's Clown" by the Everly Brothers (1960), pop
"Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys (1965), rock
"The Sounds of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel (1964-65), folk rock
"Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees (1977), disco
"Your Love" by The Outfield (1985), pop rock
"Hold On" by Wilson Phillips (1990), pop
It looks like the falling-crime periods feature more women in the role, while men come to the foreground during rising-crime times. Rising crime selects for more showy displays -- not competitive, just colorful, loud, expressive, and so on. Men are naturally more expressive than women, especially as performers before an audience, so the major harmonizers from the '60s, '70s and '80s are predominantly male, compared to the more subdued and similar-sounding female voices from the mid-century.
Men also want to carve out a little more of an individual niche for themselves in a group, as opposed to the blanket conformity of girl groups, so their voices are more distinctive. You can hear the differences more among the Beach Boys than the Chordettes.
As the '70s wore on, close harmonies are rarer and not as prominent within a song that does use them, like the hits by the Bee Gees. By the time you get to "Your Love," there's a very clear lead singer. Here you can see the rising inequality trend beginning to eat away at the band-of-equals vocal technique of just a few decades earlier. These days you don't really hear it at all.
Fun fact: the performers of "Hold On" are two daughters of a Beach Boy and a daughter of two bandmates from the Mamas & the Papas. Harmonizing runs in the family, but can only earn them success if the larger culture is interested in that sound. There are probably a few other minor girl groups from the '90s who did close harmony, but Wilson Phillips were the last to make an impression.
I haven't bothered to go into much detail about why more and closer harmonies tend to go with rising egalitarianism, and vice versa, since it's straightforward. It provides a nice test of the idea there's some causal link, as we see cause-and-effect better in a look over time. Comparing groups at the same point in time yields something similar, though.
Girls prefer less hierarchy in social relations, and sure enough, they are more likely to harmonize rather than have each member stand out in their own way.
I don't know much ethnomusicology, but my impression is that harmonies are more common in the folk music of less hierarchical societies. For example, many groups in Central and Eastern Asia have some form of overtone singing ("throat singing") which emphasizes harmony. However, this seems to be found mostly among the pastoralist and hunter-gatherer groups there, not the large sedentary agricultural societies. And that's regardless of their ethno-cultural-linguistic group -- it's big among the Mongolians, Tibetans, and Tuvans, but not so much among the Han, Koreans, and Japanese, who employ more florid individual-focused voices. Also notice how given Celts are to harmonizing, compared to Anglo-Saxons.
I don't know much ethnomusicology, but my impression is that harmonies are more common in the folk music of less hierarchical societies. For example, many groups in Central and Eastern Asia have some form of overtone singing ("throat singing") which emphasizes harmony. However, this seems to be found mostly among the pastoralist and hunter-gatherer groups there, not the large sedentary agricultural societies. And that's regardless of their ethno-cultural-linguistic group -- it's big among the Mongolians, Tibetans, and Tuvans, but not so much among the Han, Koreans, and Japanese, who employ more florid individual-focused voices. Also notice how given Celts are to harmonizing, compared to Anglo-Saxons.
At any rate, I'll keep my eyes peeled for other things like this that track inequality instead of crime. It's not easy to find something that links the '20s through the '60s or '70s, and splits that whole chunk off from the '80s through today. If something else strikes your attention, let us know.
October 6, 2013
When TV characters kiss, do girls in the audience scream "Wooo!" anymore?
Now there's a dissertation topic for a grad school flunkie in media / gender studies to pursue. Look through the kissing scenes from the top 10 shows in the Nielsen ratings for each year, and measure how great the audience response is. Of course it's a silly project, but it would be an actual result that somebody might find interesting -- unlike whatever else those people are thinking of for their senior thesis or dissertation.
I was hoping somebody else had already done this work, so that I could just link to them. But nobody seems to have noticed or felt it was worth writing about. Well, they do know what the phenomenon is, just not whether it's stopped and why. TV Tropes has an item about it under the vocalizations expected of the Studio Audience:
WooOOOoo (rising and falling tone)
This is for romantic moments. Like, after three seasons of Will They or Won't They?, the couple finally have the First Kiss. Or an established couple have a bit of dialog with some innuendo and run upstairs to the bedroom together.
This used to happen all the time on teen-and-tween-oriented shows, especially Saved by the Bell. Here is a typical example from a 1992 episode. A quick check around YouTube for something from a more recent teen sit-com came up with this clip from a 2012 episode of iCarly. Man, is that weak! Barely even gets off the ground. Not to mention lots of nervous laughter ("awkward!"). I clicked around the "related videos" to see other contempo kissing scenes, and this one seems to be average or above for level of emotion coming from the audience. Often they don't react at all, or again with only nervous giggling.
What was all that wooooo-ing about, and why has it stopped?
It only or mostly came from the girls in the audience -- the guys didn't shout out "all right!" or whatever. And it was always directed at a female character. How can you tell, when both the guy and the girl are kissing? I don't know, but you just can! The female audience members are empathizing with the female role, so they're letting out the expression they would feel if they were playing that character's role. And it happened whether the girl was the recipient or the initiator. So it wasn't so much about what particular role she was playing, but about the end result that she was locking lips with some dreamy dude.
Girls sure used to heat up easier, didn't they? All it took was seeing one little kiss between actors, not even real-life maker-outers. The swelling, then calming tone clearly echoes sexual build-up, climax, and coming-down. And the swooning chicks in the audience weren't cherry-picked from the local slut brigade -- that's just how the average all-American girl responded back in the '80s and early '90s. Not keeping it to themselves, either, but erupting in a chorus. "I mean, we're all feeling the same thing, right? OK, why be all shy and ashamed then?" Note that they used to feel unashamed of something basically wholesome, if unsettling-to-their-fathers, rather than unashamed of off-putting character flaws like they are today.
In fact, now they're more likely to not respond at all. I can't tell if that's because girls these days are more autistic and have trouble empathizing with the actress, or if they just don't sense much passion playing out before them, and feel little there to resonate with. Likely both. When they do respond, nervous laughter is almost guaranteed. Any expression of anxiety (laughter or otherwise) is a form of heightening their self-awareness or alertness, which slams the brakes on whatever ride they could have been going on. They can't turn off their internal spotlight and get lost in the moment. No catharsis.
What about the fact that it's nervous laughter rather than nervous coughing or awkward silence? If it's laughing-at, then they're trying to send a signal of derision, contempt, sarcasm, or otherwise "being above" something as silly, trivial, or dirty as feeling passion. It's not dripping venom, but even a subtle expression of superiority gets the point across -- don't try to get me excited, because my body and my brain just don't work that way. If it's laughing-with, then it's part of the larger pattern young people have of pointing out their own awkwardness, and trying to get others to laugh-with, so that none of them feels too pathetic for being so awkward. To my ears, it sounds more like laughing-with, so the audiences are communicating, "I know, right? We are too awkward to enjoy kissing, smh."
I'll leave it as an exercise for the readers to find out when all this woooo-ing began to rise toward its culmination on Saved by the Bell. It's hard to find specific scenes on YouTube, so searching for "Brady Bunch kiss" didn't turn anything up. But maybe messing around with the terms will uncover something. I do remember it being a staple on sit-coms of the late '80s, though. And was it only on teen-oriented shows, or would the Mary Tyler Moore Show have had it too? Or Laverne and Shirley?
Anti-social eating options still on the rise
After roughly figuring out the rise and fall of social connectedness for our current cycle, the thing that really crystallized how similar the mid-century was in its cocooning was writing about the drive-in restaurant. Then, oddly enough, recognizing that it has undergone a revival since the 1990s, with Sonic Drive-In being the most successful franchise.
Later there was news about Burger King test-marketing a delivery service, which has gone into full effect in many large cities across the country by now. Not to mention other largish chains like Jimmy John's that deliver by bicycle. For the entire 1970s through the '80s, Domino's was the only pizza delivery chain. Starting in the early '90s, everyone else suddenly jumped on the bandwagon, beginning with Pizza Hut, which used to be a sit-down restaurant. No new technology had made this easier on the supply side, so that signaled an abrupt change in preferences on the demand side. Fewer and fewer people felt like going out like they had just 5-10 years earlier.
Now an article in the NYT details how the model of "delivery anytime, anywhere" has become pervasive in a city that you'd think from its re-branding campaign of the 1990s was more open to socializing. Not anymore, though. "The city that never sleeps" used to refer to a work hard / play hard lifestyle (CBGB, Studio 54, Danceteria). Since the '90s, it refers to the workaholic, OCD, earbuds-at-the-gym, get-outta-my-way, hive-mindedness of its insectoid population. Physically crammed in, yet psychologically disconnected.
Perhaps nothing is dearer to New Yorkers than the idea that in this city, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it this year, “I order food, it’s at my door in 10 to 15 minutes. O.K.?” (Justice Sotomayor, who grew up in the Bronx, had unkind words for Washington restaurants, where “there isn’t a place I call where it doesn’t take 45 minutes.”)
The horror of having to leave the work-hive and interact with the hu-mahns! Why can't we just have a fleet of drones deliver our meals, so we never have to leave our snug little cells? Used to be that getting the fuck out of the office for some fresh air and fresh faces was something that normal people looked forward to every day. Otherwise the workplace gets too stifling, and it mushifies the brain.
Are Millennials so autistic that they would actually place a delivery order from inside another restaurant?
When Market Table, the West Village restaurant that Jules Auger’s friends had picked for dinner one night, ran out of the cheeseburger special, Mr. Auger, unwilling to commit to the prix fixe menu his friends had chosen — and apparently unmoved by the restaurant’s two-star review in this newspaper, its five-star raves on Yelp or its recommendation in the Michelin guide — pulled up Seamless on his smartphone.
A cheesesteak place promised speedy delivery. Mr. Auger instructed the deliveryman to come to the restaurant and seek out the hostess, who — while not exactly amused — condoned Mr. Auger’s alternate dinner.
“I think she thought it was a joke,” said Mr. Auger, an intern at an advertising agency. “Didn’t get kicked out, though.”
More befuddled was the deliveryman who showed up outside, seemingly expecting an apartment building. Mr. Auger hurried outside to receive his cheesesteak (“quite mediocre,” he recalled), which he ate outside, he said, “out of respect.”
It's not enough for a "group" of people to all pull out their phones and seal themselves off in their own separate worlds -- they each have to place delivery orders from different places, so that there will be no sense of sharing a meal. Might as well all eat outisde too ("out of respect" -- what a baldfaced retard), and in stalls separated by privacy partitions. Then we can text each other, or post on each other's Facebook about how quite mediocre the whole experience was, without even re-grouping afterward. These wild 'n' crazy kids these days...
It's amazing that the basic rules governing meal-sharing should have to be spelled out, but what can you expect from the sperg-iest generation in history?
People ask every once in awhile, Do you notice any signs of the cocooning behavior slowing down or reversing? Zero. It's still getting worse with every year. These cycles seem to last about 60 years, with a longer roughly 35-year swing upward (more outgoing, rising-crime) and a shorter 25-year decline (cocooning, falling-crime). That still leaves us with perhaps another 5 years or so before we hit rock bottom and begin to turn around. Today's social zeitgeist is closest to the early 1950s, not the later half when things begin to shake up.
October 2, 2013
Identity politics -- Balkanization or normlessness?
More and more you hear phrases like "the gay community," despite the utter absence of community among gays. And no, it doesn't count that they congregate in the same space to get high and jerk each other off. There couldn't be anything more egocentric. They have no sense of belonging to an ethno-cultural-linguistic group that has been around for a long time before they were born and will continue on far after they've died. Hence their profound sense of being social outcasts and cultural orphans, desperate to have the mainstream give them a big hug, pat them on the head, and tell them "I love my dead gay son."
In fairness, it's not just the queer community that has no community -- women, the handicapped, fat folks, and most glaringly, autistics do not have a social-cultural community unto themselves. Women are part of the black or white community, fat people could be Mexican or American, and so on. The closest thing there is to an unrecognized community is the deaf -- they do form enduring groups together primarily based on linguistic separation from outsiders, who they cannot join, and who show little interest in learning sign language to join them.
And sure enough, the community-free groups are the ones we keep getting beat over the head with. Black rights or black power couldn't sound more passé for do-gooders, and when was the last time you saw a national or regional propaganda campaign relating to deaf people? Open borders and immigration are popular causes, but those are more tactics of class warfare than of ethno-cultural autonomy.
And we've only been beaten over the head with these groups since the early 1990s. Political-economic divisions and polarization have been steadily increasing since the later part of the '70s, and no later than 1980. If "identity politics" were about political-economic conflict, then we should've seen a surge of it all through the '80s. Yet it's not until circa 1992 that homo-enablers and feminazis really come out of the woodwork, and somewhat later still for tubbo tolerance and sperg pride.
So, rather than being a case of Balkanization or divide-and-conquer, identity politics looks like it belongs to something else. Specifically, something not political or economic, but more social or cultural. A change in the average person's mindset, and in what they prefer or prefer not to see in their popular culture.
The main change of the past 20 years in that realm has been cocooning. How has that caused the rise of identity politics? Socially isolated folks shouldn't care about other people's issues, after all. But most "supporters" of gay marriage, feminism, etc., these days don't actually care about those issues. It's just a signal they send to let others know I'm on the right side, so don't come after me. They just want to be left alone in their cocoons.
Hence the rise of "South Park Republicans" -- people who still probably make gay jokes, or laugh at them when others make them, but are still officially on the side of homosexuals. It's an ideological quid pro quo -- I won't judge you if you won't judge me, deal? I'll refuse to enforce any norms upon you if you refuse to enforce any upon me, deal?
So it is the grassroots push for normlessness, rather than for cultural autonomy, that is driving identity politics. If I, the cocooner, want to be left alone and not have anyone else pass judgement on me or hold me to any set of norms and standards, then I have to give a blanket approval to all other groups who might have judgement passed on them. The more severe the would-be judgement, the more credibly I signal my commitment to not commit to a group. Like, I'm not just striking a bargain with my neighbor who has his own ordinary problems that could use some community norm enforcement -- I'm giving a pass to the most clearly abnormal groups like gays and autistics, folks with obvious neural dysfunction at a basic level. If I'm that personally involved in social uninvolvement, you can trust me to ignore everyone else's norm violations as well.
Why didn't we see a surge of identity politics during the cocooning mid-century? I think the political-economic polarization plays a secondary role. Folks back then weren't into being into other people's lives, so there was a widespread sense of drift and malaise, but the political climate was firmly toward consensus and harmony. This made it impossible for special interest groups to hijack the process and turn normlessness into a political weapon.
I'm still busy looking deeper into Victorian, especially late Victorian, popular culture, but I think there may have been something more like what we know as identity politics. And it was precisely the two main groups that we've seen in our own time -- women and gays. The Victorian "New Woman," and the homo mafia among the elite that tried to make a political statement out of buggery, a la Oscar Wilde. A decent size of the gay population in large English cities were outright cross-dressers -- as in, enough to be visible and commented on -- while mid-century homos were almost all in the closet. Flamboyant faggots have only returned within roughly the past 20 years -- again, I mean common enough to see how flagrantly they flout our norms in public.
In any event, as depressing as normlessness sounds, I think over the long term it has a better chance for reversal. Again consider how decadent and perverted the end of the 19th century was, compared to The Wonder Years of the 1960s. Balkanization is far less likely to reverse course -- just look at the Balkans.
And we've only been beaten over the head with these groups since the early 1990s. Political-economic divisions and polarization have been steadily increasing since the later part of the '70s, and no later than 1980. If "identity politics" were about political-economic conflict, then we should've seen a surge of it all through the '80s. Yet it's not until circa 1992 that homo-enablers and feminazis really come out of the woodwork, and somewhat later still for tubbo tolerance and sperg pride.
So, rather than being a case of Balkanization or divide-and-conquer, identity politics looks like it belongs to something else. Specifically, something not political or economic, but more social or cultural. A change in the average person's mindset, and in what they prefer or prefer not to see in their popular culture.
The main change of the past 20 years in that realm has been cocooning. How has that caused the rise of identity politics? Socially isolated folks shouldn't care about other people's issues, after all. But most "supporters" of gay marriage, feminism, etc., these days don't actually care about those issues. It's just a signal they send to let others know I'm on the right side, so don't come after me. They just want to be left alone in their cocoons.
Hence the rise of "South Park Republicans" -- people who still probably make gay jokes, or laugh at them when others make them, but are still officially on the side of homosexuals. It's an ideological quid pro quo -- I won't judge you if you won't judge me, deal? I'll refuse to enforce any norms upon you if you refuse to enforce any upon me, deal?
So it is the grassroots push for normlessness, rather than for cultural autonomy, that is driving identity politics. If I, the cocooner, want to be left alone and not have anyone else pass judgement on me or hold me to any set of norms and standards, then I have to give a blanket approval to all other groups who might have judgement passed on them. The more severe the would-be judgement, the more credibly I signal my commitment to not commit to a group. Like, I'm not just striking a bargain with my neighbor who has his own ordinary problems that could use some community norm enforcement -- I'm giving a pass to the most clearly abnormal groups like gays and autistics, folks with obvious neural dysfunction at a basic level. If I'm that personally involved in social uninvolvement, you can trust me to ignore everyone else's norm violations as well.
Why didn't we see a surge of identity politics during the cocooning mid-century? I think the political-economic polarization plays a secondary role. Folks back then weren't into being into other people's lives, so there was a widespread sense of drift and malaise, but the political climate was firmly toward consensus and harmony. This made it impossible for special interest groups to hijack the process and turn normlessness into a political weapon.
I'm still busy looking deeper into Victorian, especially late Victorian, popular culture, but I think there may have been something more like what we know as identity politics. And it was precisely the two main groups that we've seen in our own time -- women and gays. The Victorian "New Woman," and the homo mafia among the elite that tried to make a political statement out of buggery, a la Oscar Wilde. A decent size of the gay population in large English cities were outright cross-dressers -- as in, enough to be visible and commented on -- while mid-century homos were almost all in the closet. Flamboyant faggots have only returned within roughly the past 20 years -- again, I mean common enough to see how flagrantly they flout our norms in public.
In any event, as depressing as normlessness sounds, I think over the long term it has a better chance for reversal. Again consider how decadent and perverted the end of the 19th century was, compared to The Wonder Years of the 1960s. Balkanization is far less likely to reverse course -- just look at the Balkans.
The "random acts of kindness" phenomenon
Just looking through a high school yearbook from 1998, and one of the little feature articles was on "random acts of kindness." Maybe it was the context, but I thought, Y'know, that is a very '90s phrase. I don't remember hearing it in the '80s, nor seeing the behavior. But you would normally associate altruism with the '80s rather than the '90s, so something requires explaining here.
First, let's establish the timing. Here is a graph showing the frequency of the phrase in Google's digital library (Ngram). There are lone, infrequent examples from the '60s through the '80s -- as in, probably one reference a year, once every 5-10 years. It's not until 1993 that it begins a steady rise, though. Searching for the related phrase "random kindness" shows basically the same picture, only the out-of-the-blue rise begins in '92. "Acts of random kindness" explodes from out of nowhre in '94. Searching the NYT shows the first instance of "random acts of kindness" in '94, "random kindness" in '92, and "acts of random kindness" also in '92. Searching Amazon for books with "random acts of kindness" in the title shows that the earliest ones were published in '93.
What was it about the '92 to '94 period that led to the take-off of this movement? Evidently lots of people felt that there was a mismatch between the supply and need for kindness. As falling-crime times began, either folks grew stingier with kindness, or others were now in greater need as the society grew more antagonistic, or both. As recently as the 1980s, people were pretty friendly toward each other -- the low levels of shrill or harsh treatment meant that most people weren't in that great of a need for kind acts by others, and the relative lack of a glib and dismissive attitude meant that others were capable of pitching in when it was needed.
Obviously the movement did not reverse the trend, since social relations are even more fragmented now than 20 years ago -- hard as that may be to believe for folks who can still remember how sarcastic and apathetic the popular attitude had swung by 1994.
Still, did they at least pad the landing? It doesn't feel like it, not even during the movement's heyday in the later '90s or 2000s. Why not?
It wasn't simply the rarity of such acts. When they did happen, it wasn't appreciated by most of the recipients. If the performer overtly says that they're doing a random act of kindness, perhaps elaborating that it's part of a meta-goal to bring more happiness to the world, then the recipient feels like a charity case. Like they're just a tick mark moving some abstract quantity toward a quota. Even if the performer doesn't explicitly explain what they're doing and why, the utterly unusual nature of the act will tip the recipient off that they have some other goal in mind.
That brings up the suspicion of "ulterior motives." In friendlier times, the recipient wouldn't have thought much of the offer, but now that everyone's so hostile to each other, does this guy really want to be nice, or is he just trying to get something out of me? Like the "Free Hugs" thing -- clearly some outcast starved for physical attention who's trying to satisfy his need to touch girls, while dressing it up as altruism (if he has to hug the occasional dude, that's worth it to him).
It doesn't do much to elevate the performer either. Thoughtfulness should not be that thoughtful. The planned, deliberate, self-aware mindset that the performer takes on will lead away whatever other-minded intentions they may have had, and steer toward self-righteousness. And it doesn't do much to assuage their anxiety over how cold the world is growing, to believe that only calculated campaigns can keep relations friendly, rather than kindness spontaneously arising as needed. Finally, if there is an explicit goal in mind -- however fuzzy -- it sets them up for disappointment and burn-out when it, predictably, is not reached.
Beyond that, though, the most demoralizing part is the nagging doubts about how successful such a movement could be with everyone acting all isolated from each other. There doesn't need to be a national delegation, but even a local canned food drive or passing around the collection plate has a, well, collective atmosphere around it. It's not the kind of thing you can do all by yourself.
And the contact with the recipient seems too brief to sustain your motivation to continue. In practice, the performers took more of a stranger-oriented approach. Hold the door open for some old lady at the supermarket, wave a group of kids across the sidewalk instead of peeling out in front of them, and so on. But if they don't feel like members of your community, you don't get much satisfaction out of it. You don't get to see the enduring effects that you have on other people's lives because it's a one-off encounter. Nothing wrong with those drive-by forms of kindness, but they are the icing on the cake, and cannot substitute for friendliness among folks you know.
All of these factors explain why the movement arose when it did, but also why it's more or less burned out by now. Their heart was in the right place; it's just not an effective cure for the symptoms of anomie.
Historical precedents? Beats me. How would people 50 to 100 years from now learn about the "random acts of kindness" phenomenon of our times? It is something I can imagine the Pre-Raphaelites or other emo aesthetes taking a shot at during the Victorian era. Maybe during the mid-century, but maybe not -- they weren't as self-righteous as the Victorians or us.
Self-righteousness seems to show up during falling-crime, rising-inequality times. Widening inequality is marked by status contests among individuals, including do-gooders. Falling inequality, people aren't supposed to raise much of a hue and cry about things. Combine that with falling-crime / cocooning, and you get malaise, anomie, etc., but more of an Edward Hopper kind where no one makes an effort to help each other out. Though like I said, not like that appears to have much of an effect in our time.
At least people in the alienated mid-century didn't see themselves as targets for charity by deliberate do-gooders (from what little I can tell). That allows you to maintain more dignity through a period of social isolation. Performers of random acts of kindness only heighten your awareness of how unraveled the social fabric has become.
First, let's establish the timing. Here is a graph showing the frequency of the phrase in Google's digital library (Ngram). There are lone, infrequent examples from the '60s through the '80s -- as in, probably one reference a year, once every 5-10 years. It's not until 1993 that it begins a steady rise, though. Searching for the related phrase "random kindness" shows basically the same picture, only the out-of-the-blue rise begins in '92. "Acts of random kindness" explodes from out of nowhre in '94. Searching the NYT shows the first instance of "random acts of kindness" in '94, "random kindness" in '92, and "acts of random kindness" also in '92. Searching Amazon for books with "random acts of kindness" in the title shows that the earliest ones were published in '93.
What was it about the '92 to '94 period that led to the take-off of this movement? Evidently lots of people felt that there was a mismatch between the supply and need for kindness. As falling-crime times began, either folks grew stingier with kindness, or others were now in greater need as the society grew more antagonistic, or both. As recently as the 1980s, people were pretty friendly toward each other -- the low levels of shrill or harsh treatment meant that most people weren't in that great of a need for kind acts by others, and the relative lack of a glib and dismissive attitude meant that others were capable of pitching in when it was needed.
Obviously the movement did not reverse the trend, since social relations are even more fragmented now than 20 years ago -- hard as that may be to believe for folks who can still remember how sarcastic and apathetic the popular attitude had swung by 1994.
Still, did they at least pad the landing? It doesn't feel like it, not even during the movement's heyday in the later '90s or 2000s. Why not?
It wasn't simply the rarity of such acts. When they did happen, it wasn't appreciated by most of the recipients. If the performer overtly says that they're doing a random act of kindness, perhaps elaborating that it's part of a meta-goal to bring more happiness to the world, then the recipient feels like a charity case. Like they're just a tick mark moving some abstract quantity toward a quota. Even if the performer doesn't explicitly explain what they're doing and why, the utterly unusual nature of the act will tip the recipient off that they have some other goal in mind.
That brings up the suspicion of "ulterior motives." In friendlier times, the recipient wouldn't have thought much of the offer, but now that everyone's so hostile to each other, does this guy really want to be nice, or is he just trying to get something out of me? Like the "Free Hugs" thing -- clearly some outcast starved for physical attention who's trying to satisfy his need to touch girls, while dressing it up as altruism (if he has to hug the occasional dude, that's worth it to him).
It doesn't do much to elevate the performer either. Thoughtfulness should not be that thoughtful. The planned, deliberate, self-aware mindset that the performer takes on will lead away whatever other-minded intentions they may have had, and steer toward self-righteousness. And it doesn't do much to assuage their anxiety over how cold the world is growing, to believe that only calculated campaigns can keep relations friendly, rather than kindness spontaneously arising as needed. Finally, if there is an explicit goal in mind -- however fuzzy -- it sets them up for disappointment and burn-out when it, predictably, is not reached.
Beyond that, though, the most demoralizing part is the nagging doubts about how successful such a movement could be with everyone acting all isolated from each other. There doesn't need to be a national delegation, but even a local canned food drive or passing around the collection plate has a, well, collective atmosphere around it. It's not the kind of thing you can do all by yourself.
And the contact with the recipient seems too brief to sustain your motivation to continue. In practice, the performers took more of a stranger-oriented approach. Hold the door open for some old lady at the supermarket, wave a group of kids across the sidewalk instead of peeling out in front of them, and so on. But if they don't feel like members of your community, you don't get much satisfaction out of it. You don't get to see the enduring effects that you have on other people's lives because it's a one-off encounter. Nothing wrong with those drive-by forms of kindness, but they are the icing on the cake, and cannot substitute for friendliness among folks you know.
All of these factors explain why the movement arose when it did, but also why it's more or less burned out by now. Their heart was in the right place; it's just not an effective cure for the symptoms of anomie.
Historical precedents? Beats me. How would people 50 to 100 years from now learn about the "random acts of kindness" phenomenon of our times? It is something I can imagine the Pre-Raphaelites or other emo aesthetes taking a shot at during the Victorian era. Maybe during the mid-century, but maybe not -- they weren't as self-righteous as the Victorians or us.
Self-righteousness seems to show up during falling-crime, rising-inequality times. Widening inequality is marked by status contests among individuals, including do-gooders. Falling inequality, people aren't supposed to raise much of a hue and cry about things. Combine that with falling-crime / cocooning, and you get malaise, anomie, etc., but more of an Edward Hopper kind where no one makes an effort to help each other out. Though like I said, not like that appears to have much of an effect in our time.
At least people in the alienated mid-century didn't see themselves as targets for charity by deliberate do-gooders (from what little I can tell). That allows you to maintain more dignity through a period of social isolation. Performers of random acts of kindness only heighten your awareness of how unraveled the social fabric has become.
October 1, 2013
Frequent texting impairs sleep and social relationships
Here is a report on an article I haven't read, which shows that the more frequently a college freshman texts, the worse their sleep patterns are. They mention that one cause underlying that is the pressure they feel to respond to texts no matter when, and that their text-messenger ("phone") may be lying next to them at night, interrupting their sleep.
This is a clear symptom of OCD -- the strongly felt need to obsessively check and re-check the status of something, and to deal with it time and again through compulsive behaviors. In particular, for no real goal to have been accomplished at the end of all the checking and compulsive responding. Indeed, worse than just wasting time, their obsessive-compulsive behavior may be harming their basic, daily well-being -- like keeping them from getting a good night's sleep.
It might seem strange to suggest that an entire generation has OCD, but if that sounds odd, you haven't been around many Millennials.
Frequent texting also predicted greater vulnerability to stressful times in a social relationship. If you were already heading in the stressed-out direction, being an excessive texter made it worse. It's suggested that texting in a troubled time makes things worse because the lack of nuance and non-verbal communication allows a volatile situation to explode or melt down.
The study author was born in the late '60s and must have spent lots of time talking on the phone as a teenager during the '80s. So she knows that the face-to-face qualities aren't that important for effective communication. In general, the non-verbal only enhances the verbal, and is redundant. It makes for more vivid and memorable conversations, but isn't necessary. The only time when the verbal and non-verbal give opposite signals is when the person is lying. But in general, someone you're spending that much time on the phone with won't be lying to you.
Rather, the defect seems to be in literate as opposed to oral communication. When we digitize speech into literate chunks, we lose all the analog stuff -- inflection, pacing, stress, and so on. Not to mention non-linguistic sounds like laughing -- and what kind of laughter. That's hard to send in literate form.
There's also the analog changes in the person's face and mouth when they feel different emotions while talking. You can hear it when someone is smiling because the lips aren't in their usual position, their corners pulled up and back, pressing the top and bottom "rows" of the lips closer against the teeth. It just sounds different, and you know from experience that this deviation is caused by the lips deviating in a manner consistent with smiling. Lips tensed in anger make for another unusual shape to the vocal tract, and you can hear that too.
Whatever the link between excessive texting and fragile social relationships turns out to be, they are probably both co-symptoms of OCD and the related avoidant attachment style. Keep everything and everyone away because it could contaminate you or somehow else just get awkward. Dealing with others is awkward, so we won't deal with anyone. How will we still communicate with others, though? Just send a shitload of texts instead of calling them on the phone.
Technology does not force its adopters to use it in any particular way, but the other way around. If people hadn't gotten so avoidant and retarded over the past 20 years, perhaps cell phones would never have developed the texting feature. Normal people only used landline phones to talk, and that was quite stable from the 1960s through the early '90s. Only during the mid-'90s when America Online offered a primitive form of text messaging (Instant Messenger) did people begin to send literate messages to one another from the privacy of their own home, rather than call the person up.
(Even there, at first you only IM'ed people who were far away and would've costed a lot to call up, or who you'd never met in real life. IM'ing started out like a chatroom, only with two people. By the late '90s, it had become more common to IM your real-life friends instead of calling them up or hanging out with them.)
The fact that cell phones not only developed the texting feature, but that this would become the predominant way that the adopters would use it to communicate, just goes to show how socially-emotionally avoidant young people had become.
One last important thing: remember that "excessive" texting here is defined relative to the behavior of other college freshmen. I'm surprised they found a strong relationship between texting and anything because you'd think that all kids these days are hardcore texters, so you couldn't set aside the high-frequency from the low-frequency texters. (That would be a "restriction of range" problem.)
To really throw light on how texting frequency relates to sleep patterns, mental health, and so on, they'd need to look at young people who don't text much at all. See the characters in any classic teen movie from the '80s -- whatever their troubles may have been, they had a basic resiliency and didn't melt down or retreat into a cocoon, hoping their problems will magically go away.
This is a clear symptom of OCD -- the strongly felt need to obsessively check and re-check the status of something, and to deal with it time and again through compulsive behaviors. In particular, for no real goal to have been accomplished at the end of all the checking and compulsive responding. Indeed, worse than just wasting time, their obsessive-compulsive behavior may be harming their basic, daily well-being -- like keeping them from getting a good night's sleep.
It might seem strange to suggest that an entire generation has OCD, but if that sounds odd, you haven't been around many Millennials.
Frequent texting also predicted greater vulnerability to stressful times in a social relationship. If you were already heading in the stressed-out direction, being an excessive texter made it worse. It's suggested that texting in a troubled time makes things worse because the lack of nuance and non-verbal communication allows a volatile situation to explode or melt down.
The study author was born in the late '60s and must have spent lots of time talking on the phone as a teenager during the '80s. So she knows that the face-to-face qualities aren't that important for effective communication. In general, the non-verbal only enhances the verbal, and is redundant. It makes for more vivid and memorable conversations, but isn't necessary. The only time when the verbal and non-verbal give opposite signals is when the person is lying. But in general, someone you're spending that much time on the phone with won't be lying to you.
Rather, the defect seems to be in literate as opposed to oral communication. When we digitize speech into literate chunks, we lose all the analog stuff -- inflection, pacing, stress, and so on. Not to mention non-linguistic sounds like laughing -- and what kind of laughter. That's hard to send in literate form.
There's also the analog changes in the person's face and mouth when they feel different emotions while talking. You can hear it when someone is smiling because the lips aren't in their usual position, their corners pulled up and back, pressing the top and bottom "rows" of the lips closer against the teeth. It just sounds different, and you know from experience that this deviation is caused by the lips deviating in a manner consistent with smiling. Lips tensed in anger make for another unusual shape to the vocal tract, and you can hear that too.
Whatever the link between excessive texting and fragile social relationships turns out to be, they are probably both co-symptoms of OCD and the related avoidant attachment style. Keep everything and everyone away because it could contaminate you or somehow else just get awkward. Dealing with others is awkward, so we won't deal with anyone. How will we still communicate with others, though? Just send a shitload of texts instead of calling them on the phone.
Technology does not force its adopters to use it in any particular way, but the other way around. If people hadn't gotten so avoidant and retarded over the past 20 years, perhaps cell phones would never have developed the texting feature. Normal people only used landline phones to talk, and that was quite stable from the 1960s through the early '90s. Only during the mid-'90s when America Online offered a primitive form of text messaging (Instant Messenger) did people begin to send literate messages to one another from the privacy of their own home, rather than call the person up.
(Even there, at first you only IM'ed people who were far away and would've costed a lot to call up, or who you'd never met in real life. IM'ing started out like a chatroom, only with two people. By the late '90s, it had become more common to IM your real-life friends instead of calling them up or hanging out with them.)
The fact that cell phones not only developed the texting feature, but that this would become the predominant way that the adopters would use it to communicate, just goes to show how socially-emotionally avoidant young people had become.
One last important thing: remember that "excessive" texting here is defined relative to the behavior of other college freshmen. I'm surprised they found a strong relationship between texting and anything because you'd think that all kids these days are hardcore texters, so you couldn't set aside the high-frequency from the low-frequency texters. (That would be a "restriction of range" problem.)
To really throw light on how texting frequency relates to sleep patterns, mental health, and so on, they'd need to look at young people who don't text much at all. See the characters in any classic teen movie from the '80s -- whatever their troubles may have been, they had a basic resiliency and didn't melt down or retreat into a cocoon, hoping their problems will magically go away.
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